Timebomb

Chapter 17

They were beside a lake. To reach it, Carrick reckoned they had walked three miles.

He had thought it remarkable that Reuven Weissberg, the Russian who had lived variously in Perm, Moscow and Berlin, could follow trails and tracks through the forest, could move there with the latent confidence of an animal whose place it was. He had followed as exactly as possible under the trees. His target had stayed as the centre of Reuven Weissberg’s back, and when he lost it, the penalty was to blunder into tree trunks or have his face whipped by low branches.

Carrick had been alerted that they approached the lake by the splashes and call of water fowl. Near to it, they had moved along a track wide enough for a tractor and trailer, and he had fallen into one of the deeper ruts left by a tyre. He had been pitched forward, his momentum catching Reuven Weissberg’s haunches. For a moment, then, a hand had been at Carrick’s throat, tight, hard and squeezing. He had choked once, then heard laughter. He had been on his knees and the hand had left his throat and lifted him … Strange laughter, and not from a world Carrick knew. The same hand had gone to his shoulders and gripped them; then they had gone the last yards and the lake had been in front of them. Remarkable — no map, no compass and the GPS not used. Carrick thought that Reuven Weissberg knew the forest and the routes through it as a native would, or as a boar or a deer.

The tree line ran right to the water’s edge.

He was told, ‘I was here once. A man had been fishing. I did not speak to him and he would not have known that I watched him. He brought a boat to this place and tied it, then left it.’

He was not told why Reuven Weissberg had been in the forest, moving with the secrecy of a hunter or a beast.

The moon found a cloud gap. The water shimmered and there were ripples to match the squeal of the birds. They went to the very edge. He thought of those few seconds when his throat had been gripped, then freed, and when the fist had taken hold of his coat and the strength of the man had lifted him, of the ferocity of the first seconds and the kindness that had followed. The boat was there. Old abilities had returned. His vision in the darkness, augmented by the moon’s glow, was more complete than it had been when they had begun the trek through the forest. Light reflected up from the water.

There was a small inlet in the bank, a little gouge, and there was a tree with submerged roots at its mouth that would have given shelter to the place. Across the inlet was the angled black shape. He could only admire the faith Reuven Weissberg had shown in his judgement and memory. That faith had bred certainty. He followed.

He murmured, ‘I’ll do the business, sir. I will.’

Carrick eased past. He held on to the splayed sprigs of branches as he went down and into the water. His hands groped the length of the boat — well, not so much a boat, more a small punt. It was the sort of craft that some towed behind a narrowboat while navigating the Thames or the Grand Union Canal. There were times when it was easier to moor on an open bank, perhaps where cattle were, and then a punt was needed to paddle across the river or the waterway to get to a pub or a mini-market. He thought of a failed loving on a narrow-boat during the night that he’d been recruited, volunteered, and of her in the arms of the young man who had come with the old bully. His fingers found the punts dimensions, narrow and squared off at front and back, and there was a single board across its centre where a man could sit, paddle or fish from. He reckoned that the sides of the punt were some nine inches, less than a foot, above the water line. He knew little of boats. They had no place on the Spey near its mouth. The water was too fast, there were too many submerged and lethal rocks, and the anglers going after salmon used chest waders to get to the head of a prime pool. Paratroopers did not do water and boats, left them to what they called the ‘cabbage hats’ — paratroops called anybody not wearing a red beret by that title, emphasized it for marines with their green headgear — and reckoned small craft were show-ponies’ toys. There was a rope at the front of the boat and it was hooked to a ring, then looped up to a thick branch. It came away easily.

He took it and pulled the boat round, then laid the rope on his shoulder and heaved. It came up more easily than he’d have thought likely. It slithered out of the inlet, then up the shallow bank. The mud helped it.

He tipped it over and rainwater dribbled out. Carrick said, his voice a whisper, ‘That’s good, sir. It was holding water — it means it’s sound. Know what I mean, sir? It doesn’t leak.’

But he had nothing to boast of. The river in the Brecon mountains had been a fifth the width, maximum, of the Bug, and the flow had seemed strong when the officer candidates had crossed it but that strength was little compared to the rush of the Bug when he had sat above it. The plan was his. He, Carrick, had suggested it, had not kept his mouth shut. The punt, on the bank and at his feet, seemed so small, fragile, for the job.

‘With this boat, Johnny, it will happen? We can cross?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He saw, in that faint light from the moon scudding in the cloud base, that Reuven Weissberg had gone to the front of the punt and lifted it. Carrick asked for a minute’s delay, moved off and went into the trees a few yards down the lake’s bank. It didn’t seem a big action to him, or a matter of great importance. He took off his coat, dropped it, and was satisfied that his actions couldn’t be seen. Then he unbuttoned his shirt from neck to waist, and tugged at the Velcro on the straps. Not big and not great.

When he was back, that minute used up, he took a grip on the punt, and the weight was shared. They started to go back the way they had come.

On the little screen, Bugsy had the co-ordinates. With the numbers there was a green light that was constant, not flashing, and the numbers hadn’t changed. Also on Bugsy’s lap was the map, and he used a pencil torch with a small, narrow beam to check the coordinates against a location. He dozed and drifted into sleep, then out of it. If the co-ordinate numbers changed and the bug moved — as it had earlier — the light switched to red. He had its position.

In the minibus, Adrian and Dennis had taken the front seats. Every few minutes one of them would wake and Bugsy would put a hand on the shoulder, lean forward and murmur in the ear of whichever had woken to get back to bloody sleep. The poor sods needed it. Fantastic, they’d been, with their foot surveillance and vehicle tailing, and they needed the rest. His bug worked a treat.

Bugsy was beside Mr Lawson, the guv’nor, squashed up against the door while Mr Lawson had a full two-thirds of the seat. He’d tried a couple of times to shift him further back across the seat, once with the gentle prodding of his elbow and once with the sharp use of his toecap, but had failed to achieve more space for himself. In the back, behind him and wedged in with the bags and the gear, the jump seats folded away, were Deadeye and Shrinks. Shrinks slept, but not Deadeye. Bugsy thought that if they were going to repeat this caper and sleep in the vehicles again, they’d need to get to a ditch or a stream and get some dhobi done. He’d have smelled pretty grim on his own, but there were six in the minibus and the accumulation of them, their socks and underwear stank it out. Socks and underwear needed washing. Well, no one had known how long they’d be gone.

The light stayed constant and the figures on the screen did not alter.

Bugsy would not have thought envy a sin, merely something that disturbed the equilibrium of colleagues thrown together on an operation. Mr Lawson, as was right for the guv’nor, was in the minibus, in a position to react at speed to information thrown up by the screen. The car was free. The two vehicles were off the main road now and had found a safe, out-of-sight parking place in a camping area about halfway between the river and where the bug beacon now was. Well, the car had been free … The girl had gone to it … The lanky lad, the guv’nor’s sidekick, had headed there too. Maybe one was in the front and the other was in the back. Maybe they were in the back together. He didn’t know, but he felt that little surge of envy at the thought of them — nice girl, and good at what she had to do. His wife said the only females he fancied were the ones in his lofts, those that could fly fast.

The figures on the screen did not change. Neither did the green light go to red.

Dawn came, and they gathered. With the first low rays of sunshine, they came back to the central point that equated with the longitude and latitude numbers given in the coded message.

The formation along the bank had seen Mikhail and Viktor take the two furthest reaches of the Bug river, and two hundred metres from each of them had been Reuven, their avoritet, and the Englishman they mistrusted. At the centre point, overlooking the river and the Belarus frontier marker, was Josef Goldmann … The instructions had been quite clear. The men from Sarov should only approach the far riverbank, in darkness, and should signal their arrival by torchlight. No flashes, no signal had been given.

For the last three hours, an eternity, they had been spread out over eight hundred metres of the Bug’s westhern bank. Had he been a Catholic or an Orthodox believer, Josef Goldmann would have said he had ‘lapsed’, or become ‘agnostic’. The Jewish faith for him had never existed, not as a child and not in adult life but — almost — he had prayed to see a light wink on the far side, or to hear a shrill whistle from Viktor or Mikhail. There had been no signal, and he was at the meeting point to which they returned, and hidden behind him, under dead branches, was the boat, ridiculously small, that Reuven and Johnny had brought, and with it the length of coiled rope. What had been not a prayer but a fervent wish and a hope had not been answered. Josef Goldmann could not remember when, if ever, he had been so cold, so miserable and so near to despair. The hours had slipped away, darkness and moonlight had become a grey smear, then the lowest beams from the sun had pierced the trees on the far side. Dearly, he wanted to take his mobile from his pocket, dial the numbers and hear Esther’s voice, but he dared not disobey the order given him.

They came coughing and spitting, stretching and grunting, cursing the new day, all except Johnny. The Englishman, his own man and saviour, was quiet, withdrawn. Josef Goldmann noticed that Johnny’s jacket was unfastened and his shirt unbuttoned, and thought it extraordinary on a night when rain had laced down on them between the isolated moments when it had stopped and the moon had been visible and had lit the river.

He sensed the exhaustion in Reuven and Johnny. Before they had taken their spread positions, Reuven had spoken briefly of bringing the small boat from a lake by the village of Okuninka, carrying it through an expanse of forest so that its keel did not scrape a track, dragging it on the road and hiding at the side if cars came, manhandling it through the forest and past the old campsite where the killings had been done, and bringing it to the Bug bank. He had thought it incredible, a feat of strength … but the boat was so small and the river so wide, its flow so awesome.

Josef Goldmann, teeth chattering, said to any who might listen to him, ‘Perhaps they will not come.’

Viktor, surly, answered, ‘They will come. I arranged the detail. They will come.’

‘Perhaps they can’t come — an accident, a delay. A change of heart and—’

Viktor said, ‘If they don’t come, I’ll go to them and break every bone in their bodies. They’ll come.’

‘A change of heart and the realization of what they’re doing. Why do those men want a “million American dollars”?’ He realized he was babbling and that his words, Russian and English, were jumbled. ‘How can they spend a million American dollars? I don’t think they’ll come.’

He had seen, as he had spoken of money — the scale of it — in English, that Johnny Carrick’s eyebrows rose a fraction, and then he had looked away fast. Maybe, too, Viktor had seen it. Of course, Johnny Carrick didn’t know what would come across the river, if they reached it, didn’t know what was worth one million American dollars.

Reuven said, detached, ‘It’s very simple. We watch again this evening.’

‘So, we wait. What shall we do for twelve hours till the evening? What?’

He thought then that Viktor eyed him with contempt, that Mikhail sneered, and Reuven didn’t bother to answer him, and he thought that this purchase and sale had broken them, split apart the bonds of their group. It would never be the same again. Together they had climbed so high and so fast in Perm and Moscow, and Reuven had climbed higher in Berlin, while Goldmann had soared in the City of London.

He heard Reuven say to Johnny Carrick, ‘Come with me, walk with me.’

‘Yes, sir.’

They were gone, lost among the trees.

Now Josef Goldmann scoured the far bank of the Bug until the sun’s intensity burned his eyes, and knew they should never have travelled to this place, but could not say why he felt a gathering fear for what they did and its consequences.

The journey that was Reuven Weissberg’s life was a thread of cotton unrolled from a spool.

Carrick stood at the edge of the trees, with the forest behind him, and listened. He heard a story told without emotion.

The cotton’s thread had been anchored here, and it had made a great loop but had come back and now the spool was empty. In front of him was an old rail head. From the junction one track continued into the forest he had walked through, trailing after Reuven Weissberg, but near to him now was a spur in the track, a siding that came to an end in the winter-yellowed grass and beyond the last sleeper was a buffer, a crude steel frame to which a heavy plank was fastened. He believed that everything governing the life of Reuven Weissberg had started and would end here.

He was told of the camp, two kilometres from the village of Sobibor, that had been built on this site. A place for the living and a terminal for the walking dead had been built here under the terms of Operation Reinhard on virgin ground and beyond the sight of witnesses. When completed it was a killing ground. It had no role for forced labour, only for extermination. Those to be murdered were Jews.

He saw two wooden homes, one brightly painted in soft green, and learned that they had been called the Swallow’s Nest and the Merry Flea by the German officers of the SS units at the Sobibor camp: they were now the homes of men working in the forestry industry. He saw a raised platform beyond the spur track’s buffer. Great piles of stacked pit props lay on it, and open freight wagons were already loaded high. Jews had been brought to that platform from Holland, France, the Polish ghettoes, German cities, towns in Belarus and Ukraine and invited to step down from their transports. On that platform, where sunshine now fell, the Jews had descended and started the walk to their deaths.

As he listened, Carrick waited for Reuven Weissberg’s voice to break, but it did not. He was told the story in a monotone. He wondered if passion, at this place, would have been disrespectful to those who had been herded off that platform.

He was not a Jew, and Carrick struggled to understand the enormity of the deaths of a quarter of a million people. They went down a path of raked sand, walked between new-planted pine trees, and it had been named the ‘Road to Heaven’. The system of killing worked, the quiet voice in his ear told him, because the victims in the last minutes of their lives had been ‘docile’ and had gone ‘like sheep’ where he now trod. There were stones laid between the new pines on to which had been bolted inscriptions: ‘In memory of my mother [a name], my father [a name], my grandmother [a name], my grandfather [a name], my grandmother [a name], my grandfather [a name]. May your souls be bound up in the bound of life.’ They came to a clearing, had come past a block of harsh stone, square and dominating, and a statue on a plinth of a twice-man-sized figure that held a child against a hip. It was ravaged by weather, and the sharpness of the sculptor’s chisel was blunted. In the clearing a huge circular shape, a mound, was covered with fine white chippings. The shape was where the ashes of a quarter of a million souls had been gathered, heaped.

Birds sang. The wind rippled the tops of the pines and rustled the birch leaves on the forest floor.

There were no fences, no barracks huts. The killing was described to him, but the chambers into which the gas had been powered were gone and no sign of them remained. He closed his eyes as the story was told of the deaths, of the engine’s rumble, of the geese squawking, of the final gasped notes of the anthem sung behind the sealed doors. After the silence and the switching off of the engine, he saw the doors of the chambers opened by emaciated worker ants who served to live another day, and the carrying away of the rigid bodies. And saw, also, a line of women at benches sorting the discarded clothes and suitcases of those who had come in ignorance or in terrified submission on the trains to Sobibor.

Carrick vomited. There was little food in his stomach but he retched bile and the cough scraped his throat. He saw the woman at the bench, Reuven Weissberg’s grandmother, and she handled clothes still warm from their contact with those now dead. The bile gleamed at his feet. When he was finished, when there was nothing left in his stomach to bring back, he felt ashamed of his weakness, and kicked dead leaves over the mess.

Here — at this camp alone, at Sobibor — there had been a revolt and a break-out. At no other camp, he was told, had that happened. Trees grew where the fences had been, where the mines had been spread and where the compound for the work-prisoners was sited. The watchtowers had long been taken down. He listened to the soft murmur of the wind in the trees, and heard the cheerfulness of the songbirds. He heard the name of Pechersky, the Russian officer, the Jew who was a leader, and in Carrick’s ears was the hammer of machine-guns, the rippling blast of detonated mines, the panic and screaming of those who ran towards the trees. Above everything, in his closed eyes and deafened ears, was the slowly summoned sight and sound of abject cruelty.

He thought that in his life nothing had prepared him for this place, and for the quiet telling of the story of those who had charged the wire. And climbed it. And gone through the mines to reach the trees. He thought he walked in a place of history. Words jumbled in his mind. They were courage and desperation and fear and hunger and exhaustion. It was made a place of history because here people had fought back against impossible odds. He was told then of more deceit, betrayal and a greater deception.

They were in the trees and the monuments of the camp, what scraps remained of it, were behind them. Carrick thought they followed a cotton thread laid long before as Reuven Weissberg recited without hesitation, as if it had often been told him.

We had spent the night in the forest. Always Samuel held my hand. He gripped it. I would have wanted, in that darkness, to lie down. I craved sleep. I had no strength, we had no food — I only realized when night came that what little food I had had from the morning had been in my coat pocket, which had ripped when we went over the wire. I had lost the food.

He would not permit me to lie down, to sleep. He kept moving, tugging me along. He was searching for Pechersky, for the Russian group of which he was a part. It could have been four or five hours that we had walked, stumbled, among the trees in the darkness and then we saw, both of us, that we had circled the camp and were back, almost, where we had started from. I could have wept, but he did not, so I stopped the tears. All of that strength had been wasted, but we began again.

I had told Samuel that I came from the town of Wlodawa, to the north, a few kilometres, but also confessed to him that I had never before been in this forest and had no knowledge of it. I could not help or guide him.

Sometimes we heard shots in the night, and then we would veer away. Twice we heard the voices of Germans and Ukrainians. We found people who were wounded; they had injuries from the mines or the machine-guns in the watchtowers. They had crawled on their stomachs into the trees. We came upon a man who had no leg, and another who was blinded by shrapnel. Both begged that we stop and help them — but we moved on. They cursed us. We heard their curses, growing fainter, as we left them. We were the living, and were whole, and it did not seem necessary to stay with them and help. What help could we have given them? The camp had taught us to help only ourselves.

Dawn came. Rain fell in the forest that early morning. Now we saw more who had achieved the break-out. Now, also, we saw through the upper branches of the trees that a small aircraft circled the forest and it was low enough for us to read the markings on the wings. Now shots came more often. The dawn light, of course, was from the east. To the east was the Bug river. It seemed right, the solution, to go east in the trees if we were to find Pechersky and Samuel’s friends. Each group we came upon — three or thirteen, and one of thirty persons — recognized Samuel and his Russian uniform, begged him to lead them, and each time he held my hand firmer and broke clear. He said to me that the bigger the group, the greater the danger of the Germans finding us. I didn’t argue. There were some we met in the forest whom I had known for weeks, even months — they had shown kindness to me, had shared with me, had comforted me, but I didn’t return, then, the kindness, the comfort. We were animals. We loved only our own lives.

I think we must have been near to the river, perhaps a kilometre from it, when we found the group led by Pechersky. With him and his Russians there were forty others, mostly Jews from Poland. Pechersky was the leader, it was obvious. There was a confusion of voices until he spoke. Then there was silence as he was listened to.

The word from Pechersky was that all the bridges over the Bug were guarded by detachments of Field Police, that more Germans were now sweeping through the forest, that units on horseback had arrived to make the search more efficient.

Most of the day we stayed in that place. More fugitives had come. At the sight of Pechersky their faces, every one, lost the lines of fear and were lit again with hope. Pechersky was the saviour. During the day, the group would have grown to about seventy. All of us knew we owed our lives to him.

Many said there was no chance of survival if they were not close to Pechersky.

In the late afternoon, Samuel was waved forward.

He had released my hand. I think the feeling had gone from it, leaving it numb, because he had held it so tight and so long.

I watched him go into the inner core of the group. He stepped round and through the Polish Jews, who huddled near to the Russians. He was taken right in, near to Pechersky. It was not Pechersky who spoke to him, but others among the Russians. It was where the leadership was and the weapons, and they were the men who had not been inside Sobibor long enough to be exhausted and starved. There was talking, but so quiet that the Jews in the outer ring did not hear. Twice I saw Samuel shake his head very violently. For a few seconds he looked away from them and towards me, but I couldn’t see what he thought. The Russians he had been speaking to shrugged, as if a matter had been discussed and an answer had not been found. Then he came back to me.

I didn’t ask Samuel what had been said, why he had shaken his head as if refusing something. I had to rest. My weight was against his shoulder and his arm was round me. I think I slept, and I don’t know for how long.

I slept pure sleep. I forgot about hunger and tiredness. I had no dream. When I woke, it was the afternoon. It might have been rain on my face, dripping from a tree, that had woken me. They were going in a short column. The Russians were going. I didn’t see Pechersky and I assumed he was at the front. I started up. I knew we should follow them, but Samuel didn’t move. When I tried to stand he pulled me down roughly. It was the first roughness I had seen from him.

I asked why we didn’t stay with them, go where they went.

I could hear then the aircraft away to the west, more shooting. The last of them went. They disappeared into the trees. I lost sight of them.

I asked Samuel why we were not with them. He told me they had gone to find food, and he said it in a clear voice, quite loud. He said that the Russians, led by Pechersky, were the fittest and strongest and would be more likely to find food. In ten minutes — it is difficult to have any real understanding of time, but it wasn’t long — Samuel helped me to my feet. For a moment we were at the edge of the group, and then we were gone from them. We slipped away. He led me by the hand and had that same secure, tight grip on me. We did not, either of us, look back. We left that clearing where the group was gathered.

Why?

The direction he took me was towards the fall of the light, towards the west. The Bug river was to the east, and the Russian army was in the east, but he took me west and deeper into the forest, almost, I reckoned, in the direction of the camp. We saw, on a wide track, four Germans on big horses — fine, well-fed and — groomed horses — and the Germans had rifle butts rested on their thighs. We watched, and were frozen against a wide pine’s trunk. A fugitive broke clear, came on to the track, saw them and started to run. I heard the shots and the laughter, but I didn’t see the death.

Why?

Samuel told me that Pechersky had not gone to get food. He had said he was going to get food, and to make his statement more believable he had collected money from the group and told them it would be used to buy food from farmers and woodsmen. Samuel told me that Pechersky did not believe so large a group had a chance of crossing the Bug, that he had achieved what he had hoped, had led the successful break-out. He had responsibility now only for his Russian comrades. Pechersky had abandoned the group with one rifle.

I asked Samuel why he had not gone with Pechersky.

He almost stuttered the answer. I promise, then, that blood ran in his cheeks. He could have gone. They would, of course, have taken him — but not me. It had been said to him that if one non-Russian was taken, because of a friendship, a hundred should be taken because of friendships. Only those who were Russians would go with Pechersky.

I asked Samuel again why he had not gone with Pechersky and taken the best chance of living.

The blush made his cheeks scarlet. ‘I refused to leave you. I told them I was with you and would remain with you. It was why they shrugged … but they wouldn’t change their decision and let us accompany them.’

I had found love, and the ultimate moment of deceit. I believe I would have done it, told the lie and gained a better opportunity of survival. Samuel did not.

That was love. We went far into the forest. We were together, only us two. The aircraft overhead seemed further from us, the gunfire more distant. We moved on.

Carrick stood. Reuven Weissberg had hold of his arm, and there was venom in his voice. ‘I owe nobody anything. I have no responsibility, no obligation, to anyone. There was one love, but around it were the layers of betrayal. They rot in hell and they don’t matter to me, those of the past and those of today. For what was done here, for the lies spoken, I owe nobody anything.’

‘I think I understand, sir.’

Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy and made gold pools on the leaves of the last autumn. He seemed to see them walking, the boy and the girl, and maybe — in that false brightness — they laid the trail of cotton thread. He was captivated by the place and the images of it given to him, as he was captivated by the presence, personality and almost manic intensity of the man who had brought him there. Always they were in front of him, the boy and the girl.

It rang in his head. I owe nobody anything. He thought the birds sang prettily, but then, abruptly, their calls were overwhelmed by the distant whine of a chain-saw. He had crossed lines — demarcation strips of ethics and morality — had not seen them, would not have recognized them. He followed Reuven Weissberg.

Lawson had an eye half open.

He heard Deadeye quiz Bugsy, ‘That thing still working?’

‘Mind your manners. Of course it is. Good signal, clear and strong.’

‘What’s he doing, the subject?’

‘Not doing anything.’

‘Come again?’

Bugsy said, ‘He’s not doing anything because he hasn’t moved. The location is at the side of a lake south-west-south of Okuninka, about a klick out of the place, and he hasn’t shifted. A ten-metre move’ll register, but nothing has. Must be sleeping.’

‘Funny place to sleep.’ Deadeye shrugged.

‘Well, he hasn’t moved, that’s for certain.’ Bugsy was defiant, always would be if his gear’s capability was in question.

Lawson intervened. He had arched his back, stretched out his legs and coughed a little. He said, ‘Chuck the item out of the car, Deadeye. Put yourself in it with Bugsy — please, my friend, if you don’t mind — and drive into the metropolis of Wlodawa. I doubt there are croissants on sale, but some rolls and cheese, perhaps a bag of apples, coffee if you can find it — yes, and toilet rolls, some pairs of socks, if there’s a shop. I would suggest the Okuninka road into Wlodawa. Well, don’t hang about, Deadeye.’

He watched Deadeye go, and Bugsy follow him. They did, indeed, chuck the item out of the car, Davies from the front and the girl from the back, which was hardly red-blooded of either, and the car was driven away from the camping area. He could always rely on Deadeye, and he valued that man’s abilities above the rest of his team — and needed the abilities. A phrase that had come from Clipper Reade, was trotted out in moments when crisis seemed to loom: an agent not showing, a covert observation post identified overlooking a dead-drop, a tail in place and seen. Clipper Reade would say, ‘I think we have, Christopher, an IAP moment, don’t you?’ Clipper Reade was rarely vulgar. Lawson thought he now faced an Intensifying Ass Pucker moment, and felt that tightening of those muscles.

He kept it to himself, didn’t show his increasing anxiety to the rest of them. And he thought time was ebbing, went fast through his fingers … and it would happen, yes, and very soon, but his control was slipping.

The Crow stared ahead, and had no wish to talk.

‘Shouldn’t they have been here by now?’ The man had come to his car, opened the door and slid into the vacant passenger seat. He had looked with growing frequency at his wristwatch, and it was the third time he had asked that question. The first time the Crow had shrugged, as if that should have been enough of an answer. The second time, he had gestured with his hands, outstretched above the steering-wheel.

Now, the Crow said, ‘There will have been a delay.’

‘What sort of delay?’ There was a squeak in the voice, apprehension and nagging worry. ‘How can there be a delay?’

The Crow carried many burdens. He thought then that, chief among them, dealing with novices, those with necessary expertise but without experience, was the most taxing. Kids who had not been on the front line of the struggle stretched his patience and calm exterior almost to a break-point. They wanted chatter, demanded to belong, had no sense of being a mere valve in a great engine, needed to talk.

‘There might have been a delay in the collection or in its transshipment. There are many reasons for a delay.’

‘How long do we sit here? I’ve never slept in a car. I haven’t eaten. How long?’

But they couldn’t be ignored, slapped down, insulted to silence and left to sulk. So often an amateur from outside the inner tested circle of activists was needed — an engine didn’t function without a ‘mere valve’. A mighty sum of money, ten million American dollars, was to be paid over if this gabbling, fearful little idiot gave the assurance that the device indeed contained a core in spherical shape — the size of a moderate orange — of weapons-grade plutonium. He, the Crow, could not give such an assurance. Neither could the men who had planned his journey, nor those at the container port in Hamburg’s harbour who would move the device on, nor those who would take it from another dockside and carry it to the target area, nor those who would bring it the final metres of its journey and detonate it. None could give the assurance that the damage created would be worth the expenditure of ten million American dollars. When he had fought in Afghanistan, where he had been wounded in the throat and his voice changed by the Soviet artillery shrapnel, there had been similar kids who had talked too much, had wanted comradeship, and their bones were whitened by the ravages of the winter gales on the mountains. They had died because they had lacked the strength to endure silence; it was the hard, quiet men who survived, that war and this struggle. He did not show his exasperation, or his contempt.

‘We wait through this day and into the evening. If they are delayed and are coming, I will be called and we will stay here until they reach us. If they do not call we will know it has failed. Later, I will get some food. You are a stranger to me but I regard you as my friend. And you should know that there are those senior to me who know your name, the sacrifices you make and the dedication you show. They have very considerable respect for you.’

He could lie, in his hoarse, rasping voice, with ease. The Crow excused himself, left the car and walked off into the bracken and gorse. He searched for a hidden place where he could defecate, and be free of the idiot’s interrogation.

Molenkov still had that foulness in his mouth. It burned and his gums were raw.

They came to Kobrin, a small town. Molenkov knew that, because Yashkin had informed him that the population at the last census was fifty-one thousand. It was a mercy to Molenkov, as he nursed the poison in his mouth, and almost in his throat, that Yashkin knew little of the place, only its population and a brief history: in the eleventh century it had formed part of the Volhynian Vladimir, in the fourteenth it had been annexed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then had been part of Imperial Russia, then a part of Poland, then had been a battlefield fought over by the Polish Army and the XIXth Panzer Corps of General Heinz Guderian, occupied by the Germans until liberation by the Soviets, a part of Belarus since 1991 and … It was a great mercy to Molenkov that Yashkin had not dug up more information from the library in Sarov. It appeared to him a dismal town, and without virtue. He coughed, spluttered and spat out of his open window, but couldn’t free himself from the awfulness of the taste in his mouth. He watched, when not coughing and spitting, the needle of the fuel gauge, which did not leave the red zone, was trapped there.

‘How much further?’ The same repetitive question.

‘Through Kobrin, then eight or nine kilometres.’

They crossed a canal bridge. The waterway was weeded up, its use as a navigation route destroyed by disrepair. Yashkin said it was a section of the waterway linking the Dnieper river to the Bug.

‘I don’t fucking care. I care about the fuel, what’s in the tank and what’s in my throat.’

It was early morning in Kobrin. The first stalls in an open market beyond the bridge were being set up, clothes hung out and vegetables stacked. The sun was shining, low, milky, unmistakable, and shadows were thrown from the stalls and reflected back from the mirrors that were the puddles. In the night, they had tried to get fuel in Pinsk.

Pinsk, then, had been a sleeping town, battened down for the darkness, the streets deserted. They had rested on that bench beside one of the old churches, and no police had come to question them, no bastard skinheads had made footballs of them or punchbags. They had driven away, then started to search. Had had to search because Yashkin, the clever one who knew every moment of history on this great route from Sarov, fifteen hundred kilometres of it, had not thought to include a length of rubber piping in the back. In a suburb of Pinsk, outside the old town, there had been a house with a tap attached to the front wall, and a hosepipe coiled round it. On the short driveway, near to the tap and the hosepipe, was a gleaming Mercedes, apparently washed the previous afternoon. Molenkov had eased his old penknife from his pocket, climbed over the wire fence beside the gate, scurried to the tap and had been sawing at the hosepipe when the house security lights had come on. He had fled with the length of pipe back to the car and Yashkin had driven off.

‘Are you an idiot, Molenkov?’ Yashkin had asked him. Through his broken mouth and split lips, he had denied it. Yashkin had said, ‘Did you not look at the type of Mercedes it was? You did not? It was a diesel.’

Four roads away, they had found a car parked at a kerb, and the house beyond the garden was in darkness. It was an old car, a Moskva, petrol-driven. Molenkov had said that he didn’t think such an old car as a Moskva would be alarmed. Yashkin had stayed at the wheel, had pulled up close to the Moskva, had switched off the Polonez’s engine. Molenkov had gone, a thief in the night, to the back of the Polonez and had unscrewed the fuel cap. He had placed it on the roof, then had gone to the parked car and unscrewed the Moskva’s cap after breaking its feeble lock with his penknife. He had inserted one end of the hosepipe into the hole, had gone to the Polonez, had stood at the back and put the other end of the hosepipe into his mouth and sucked … His mouth had filled — and the Rottweiler had thrown itself at the gate of the house. Fucking great animal, fucking great teeth. Gaped and gasped, and swallowed before he had spat. His mouth filled with petrol. Then lights were going on upstairs in the house, the Rottweiler was scrabbling with its front paws at the top of the gate, and he’d had a sight of the brute’s teeth.

They had driven away.

It was now four hours since the petrol had swamped Molenkov’s mouth, and the taste had not lessened. More had gone into the cuts in his lips and the abrasions on his chin.

Yashkin said, ‘I hope we have enough. This town is—’

‘Not another fucking history lesson.’

Yashkin grimaced. ‘Kobrin is a frontier town. The frontier zone of a pitiful country, such as Belarus is, will be heavily policed. There will be State Security men as close to each other as the mosquitoes around the Pripet marshes on a summer evening. We cannot “borrow” fuel here, and we have no money to buy it. If we beg we draw attention to ourselves. We can only hope we have enough.’

‘Suppose we get to the Bug and deliver. How do we move on to wherever?’

‘You are an idiot, Molenkov.’

‘Tell me.’

Yashkin laughed. ‘We buy the fuel station. We have a million American dollars. We can buy—’

‘Do we have sufficient to get to the Bug?’ Molenkov refused to laugh.

He saw the smile stripped from Yashkin’s face. The lips pursed, and the frown cut deeper. ‘I don’t know. Could we fail for a shortage of one litre of fuel? How far into the last litre are we? The gauge won’t tell us.’

They drove on slowly, to conserve what fuel remained, and Molenkov did not look at the road ahead but at the needle that was steady at the bottom of the red area.

On the map, ahead of them, only the village of Malorita was marked, then the open space of forest, wilderness and marshland, the blue line of the Bug river.

Molenkov asked, ‘Will you allow an idiot one more question? We’re late. We lost the schedule searching for fuel in Pinsk. Will they wait for us?’

‘Yes, they will. You worry too much, Molenkov.’

Molenkov heard the reassurance, the confidence, and didn’t know whether his friend lied. He thought of them, together, on the bank of the Bug, flashing their torches in the evening dusk — being where they should have been in the last hour before dawn — and not seeing a light on the far side. It might be that his friend lied, and that no one would be there because they had lost time.

The call came.

Lawson fumbled through his pockets, found the damned thing. Only a handful of people had that number — Lucy, of course, and an assistant director, Lavinia, who had been given it years before but had probably lost it by now or shredded the paper it was jotted on, an engineer in the speciality workshops that did the gizmos, a couple more who were scattered in that building by the Thames, and the director general. It had been Clipper’s joke, the ringing tones were of the anthem ‘Deutschland Über Alles’, but there was much of Clipper Reade’s that Lawson had made his own.

The chimes rang through the forest. He saw the astonishment spreading as he came clear of the minibus and the call tune continued. Must have woken the surveillance people, and Shrinks had the look of one who thought that this was a man around whom a serious case study could be built, but his young man, Luke Davies, eyed him as if the gesture of the anthem was not amusing but pathetic. Did it matter to Christopher Lawson? It did not. Did it matter that a bug had not moved in hours, not even by a few metres, and that the sun was climbing above the forest? It did. He pressed the ‘connect’ button.

‘Yes.’

‘Christopher?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Francis — are we on “secure”?’

‘Yes.’

His tone was brusque. Even a contact from the director general was treated as an intrusion. The voice was distant, tinny when filtered through the encryption and scrambler chip built into the phone. Of course they were on secure speech. He listened. ‘I’ve been off base for the last twenty-four hours, but I understand you haven’t called through. Where do we stand?’

‘Our position is satisfactory. Where do we stand? Specifically, we are in a forest area, quite close to the Bug river. We are south of Wlodawa and—’

He heard the impatience. No one else he knew would have employed pedantry with the director general. ‘Do we have a close surveillance aspect on our targets? What I mean is — damn it, Christopher, in words of one syllable — have we control? Are they, the targets, buttoned down?’

‘Yes.’ Lawson had not hesitated. He spoke firmly.

‘Do you still believe the situation on which you briefed me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You have the crossing-point under surveillance, and the manpower to take action?’

‘To both, yes.’

‘Is it soon?’

‘Within the next several hours is my estimate.’

‘Should you have more bodies, additional back-up?’

‘No.’

‘Christopher, I’m saying this once, not again, and believe me, the image of failure runs in my mind — it’s an apocalypse. Failure is not acceptable. I’m asking whether you should have the cavalry with you, Christopher.’

‘Nice offer — no, thank you.’

‘I can lift a telephone. I can get a battalion of Polish troops there, wherever it is, within an hour, two at the most. I can get that area made so secure that a rabbit—’

‘We’re well placed, Francis, and the cavalry is not required — for reasons we discussed, and agreed, in your office. I have the resources I need.’

‘To put my mind at rest, you confirm that you have control?’

‘Tight control, Francis. It was all predictable and there are no surprises.’

‘And the agent? How is he performing?’

He told his director general, very frankly, of his assessment of the agent. He was staring across the camping area and could see up the track and almost to the road, and he looked for the car that would bring back Bugsy and Deadeye, and thought he knew what they would bring and what they would report. ‘I really should be getting on with things, Francis, so if you’ll excuse me …’

He ended the call.

The previous evening, Tadeuz Komiski had convinced himself — without effort — that the persistence of the rain excused him from going and looking for wood for the priest to burn in his home. Wet wood, however well seasoned, would merely smoke out the man’s living room. But that morning the sun was out and his excuse was no longer valid.

Because of the expense of refilling it, he would not waste what fuel he had in his tractor’s tank. He would go early into the forest and check where there were branches brought down by the weight of the rain and the strength of the wind, those that had already died, and he would look for the heaps where the forestry men had stacked timbers that were too thin, too split or too knotted to serve as good pit props. When, if, he found sufficient wood he would walk back to his home and collect his tractor. Komiski told himself that it was only because Father Jerzy had asked for wood that he would look for it, he would have done it for no one else.

He did not take the dog, or the shotgun, but he had hitched on his shoulder the short bow-saw with its razor teeth.

He did not use the tracks that were rutted from the woodsmen’s vehicles, but he went as a wraith among the trees. Maybe it was the tiredness, maybe it was because he had not eaten — neither had his dog — since the priest had left the pie, maybe it was from the sense of freedom after closing the door of the house behind him, but he had not worked out with any precision what route he would take on his way to look for wood that was not too sodden to be burned.

The priest had asked, Was it when you were a child and living in this house that the guilt was born? Now, Tadeuz Komiski realized he was close, within a hundred metres, of where that guilt had been conceived — and there were voices.

Voices carried in the quiet of the forest. He crouched, then sank to his knees. He saw two men. He recognized one, saw the close-cut scalp, the power of the shoulders and the heavy leather coat that fell to the man’s hips. He had not seen the second before, and thought him younger. His hair not cut short, he seemed to have a less threatening body and there was a limp to his stride. They were within a few steps of where the first grave had been, a few metres from where the later storm and the rains had uncovered the bones. Tadeuz Komiski had moved those bones, had carried them as far as he was able in an awkward, dangling bundle, then had retraced his steps to retrieve an arm bone and a whole skeletal foot that had fallen away from the main frame of the long-dead corpse. Then he had made the second grave and had buried the man whose death had bred the curse.

The sun dappled down through the trees. Flies danced in its light. The birds, warmed by the sun, flitted above where the grave had been. Had they known where to look they would have walked a dozen paces to the right. The excavated pit was a metre and a half in length, a half-metre in width and a metre in depth. Tadeuz Komiski came here often, was drawn to the place, which was the torment of the curse. Now, all these years later, the grave was a slight indent in the ground. It lay between two pines, one of which had a double trunk. There were enough markers for him to know exactly where the grave had been — and where they had been, the young man and the girl. Now the grave was filled with leaves and needles from the pines, and a branch had come down on it two winters back, obscuring most of it. The priest had said: You do not have to answer me — but the only palliative for guilt is confession.

They moved on.

He could not have said why he followed them. His back now was to the great mound of ashes, the grave for a quarter of a million persons, but it was the first grave of one man that had brought down the curse on him. The sun climbed, and he moved between trees, used cover and did not feel the aches in his old joints. Tadeuz Komiski had the skills gained from a lifetime spent — where ghosts were — in the forest. He told himself he would be satisfied to find out their destination. Then he would turn and look again for dried wood.

Their pace had quickened, and they passed — and did not know it — the place where he had reburied the bones.

Reuven Weissberg said, ‘They were betrayed. My grandmother was betrayed and my grandfather. From her being taken to the ghetto in Wlodawa, from him being captured by the Nazi Army, they faced total and continuous betrayal. They were betrayed by individuals, and by systems and by nationalities … and I am of their blood. Did individuals, systems or nations care about them? None did. They were not important, not valued. They had only one chance, and it was from themselves. Destiny was in their own hands — from every other quarter, every point around them, there was treachery. I have been taught it and I believe it. In me, what happened here — in that camp — is still alive. Do you understand, Johnny?’

The eyes, gleaming, dangerous and bright, overwhelmed Carrick.

They were near to the river where it narrowed, and upstream from where the floodwater had spread over fields. Trees sprouted on the steep banks of either side, and the force of the flow was intimidating. They had reached the small boat and were near to the gathering, dismal, bowed shoulders and dropped heads, of the Russians and Josef Goldmann. Little columns of cigarette smoke eddied up from them. He no longer fought. He had seen the site of the Sobibor camp, and had heard the story, and in his mind was the frail, emaciated woman in black, with the pure white hair, the survivor who had fashioned a grandson. He understood. Almost, he was part of this place. What he had done in the night, beside a lake, before taking his share of the weight of the boat was forgotten.

‘Yes, sir,’ Carrick said.